Surface Tension Read online

  At the bar I ordered a Corona from the bartender, who had the most enormous bosom I had ever seen. Her metallic bodice looked stiff as fiberglass, like it had been molded over a couple of Patriot missiles. I was sure it took some pretty advanced engineering to provide support for that. When she brought me the beer, I waved off the glass and squeezed the lime straight into the cold bottle.

  “So what brings you in here?” she asked as she replaced the glass in the rack overhead. “I guess it’s not the entertainment.”

  I smiled. “No, you’re right there. I’m looking for anybody who knew a girl named Patty Krix.”

  She squinted at me. “Well, now, I don’t think you’re a cop. Besides, they’ve already been here. Sent over some gorilla. Wanted to know about both Patty and the boss.” She shivered, and her cleavage undulated the way a dead jellyfish does when you poke it with a stick. “Like I can tell them anything on him they don’t already have in their files.”

  “You know Crystal?”

  “He’s the boss.”

  “He sold his boat, the Top Ten, a few months ago. Do you have any idea who he sold it to?”

  She chuckled and slapped her hand down on the bar. “That’s a good one. He used to come in here sometimes and drink a cuba libre, but honey, he didn’t talk business with the likes of me. Of course, that’s all before he took this little retreat of his.”

  “You mean before he went to jail.”

  She laughed again, and the sound seemed to rise out of her in deep bubbles. “Smart girl. You some friend or relative of Patty’s?”

  I was tempted to lie, but I never was very good at it. I gave myself away half the time just by looking guilty. “No, my name’s Seychelle Sullivan. I run a boat towing service. I’m the one who found her out there, and I’m an old friend of Neal’s.”

  “That’s the guy who’s missing, right? I met him once. Not bad-looking, but Patty coulda done better. There were guys both good-looking and rich who were interested in her.” A waitress came and gave an order, and when the bartender had lined up the glasses and begun pouring, she said, “My name’s Teenie, by the way.”

  I didn’t want to ask how she’d got the name. “Had Patty worked here long?”

  “ ’Bout a year. I didn’t really know her, though. I don’t talk much to the dancers. Don’t have time. But you might try Alexis. Seems they knew each other from before or something. That’s her dancin’ over there in front of the dude with the Bulls hat on.”

  The young woman she pointed to wore a long black wig, too-heavy black eyeliner, and deep purple lipstick. Her body looked hard, not from exercise but from life. Her right nipple was pierced with a stud, and a tinkling silver chain dangled from the stud and danced as she

  did. More chains were wrapped around her waist and supported the tiny patch at her crotch. When she spun around and waggled her behind, I saw the chains disappear between her cheeks. I’m always amazed at the level of discomfort some women are willing to put up with in the attempt to look sexy.

  Drinking from the icy bottle, I wondered how I was going to pry Alexis away from the Bulls guy. His head bobbed in cadence with the music and her thrusting pelvis. She began to undo the chains of her G-string, and he reached up and slipped a twenty-dollar bill under the leather thong on her thigh.

  “Okay,” Teenie said. “I figure that about taps him out.” She shouted over the music, “Hey, Lex, come here a minute.”

  The dancer nodded in Teenie’s direction and stepped down from the stage. The Bulls guy reached for her buttocks as she passed, but she deftly swatted his hand away as though it were an annoying insect. The man got up and left as she shrugged into a shimmering golden robe. The stage was then taken by a tiny Asian girl, who began to dance for the mostly empty tables.

  “What’s up, Teenie?”

  The bartender jerked her head in my direction. “She wants to talk to somebody who knew Patty.”

  Lex turned to look at me. Her heavy makeup was not able to hide the fact that her skin was scarred from a severe case of acne, and she had a dark braise on the left side of her face. Her eyes looked like two black crab holes in the sand. “Who’re you?”

  “My name is Seychelle Sullivan.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Neal Garrett, the guy she was with, well, we’re good friends, and I’m trying to find out what happened out there.”

  “Cop who was here thinks he’s dead.”

  “Well, I have reason to believe he’s alive. I’ve got to have faith in that right now,” I said.

  “I don’t know nothin’ about that.” She pulled a pack of Marlboros out of a pocket in her robe and lit one with a purple disposable lighter. Her fingernails were a good inch long and painted purple, too.

  “How long did you know Patty?”

  “First met her at Harbor House a couple of years ago.”

  “You mean that place for runaways?”

  “It ain’t no hotel. We was both crashing there for a while.”

  I knew the place, and I knew they didn’t take in anyone over eighteen. I couldn’t believe that this woman had qualified as a teenager only a few years before.

  “Somebody told me Patty was twenty-one. How could she have been at Harbor House two years ago?”

  She looked at me like I was incredibly stupid. “Fake ID,” she said, and stuck out her lower as she exhaled blue smoke toward the ceiling.

  I wondered whether she meant they faked being younger then or older now. I suspected Patty had not even been twenty-one.

  “Do you still know anybody over at Harbor House?”

  She watched the smoke curl off the end of her cigarette, and a slight smirk of a smile passed across her face. “Yeah, I still know ’em over there.” She turned to face me. “It’s no place for somebody like you.”

  Her eyes shifted to focus on something over my shoulder then she jerked her head to the side suddenly, as though she’d been slapped by an invisible hand. “Fuck,” she muttered at the floor, all the bravado suddenly gone, and she looked like a scared kid for a brief moment.

  I looked behind me, across the restaurant, in time to see the muscular Latino bouncer lowering his arms to his sides and attempting to assume a very casual-looking pose at the door. His shades were pushed to the top of his head, balancing atop the stiff hair spikes. He glanced at us out of the corner of his eye and quickly looked away.

  Alexis continued to hurl a barrage of curse words at the floor, then bit at one of her purple nails. She looked up finally and stuck out her chin defiantly. “You done?” The cigarette she held in her right hand was trembling slightly.

  “Can you think of any reason why somebody would have wanted to kill Patty?”

  “Shit, who needs a reason? Hey, look, it was just her time. When your time’s up, it’s up, and there’s not shit you can do about it.” Her eyes went unfocused again as she glanced over my shoulder and then lightly touched the bruised side of her face with the two fingers that held the burning cigarette. Suddenly she stood and stubbed out the butt in a plastic ashtray. “I gotta get back to work.”

  Teenie reached across the bar and patted the back of my hand. It was an odd gesture, comforting in a motherly sort of way.

  “What was that all about?”

  “Don’t mind her. It wasn’t nothing. She acts that way ’round everybody. Thinks ’cause she’s had a hard time of it, it gives her the right to be rude. She’s too young to realize that everybody’s got a story, not just her.”

  I watched Alexis walk across the floor, then turned back to the bartender. “Thanks, Teenie.” After paying for my beer, I headed for the door. Alexis had tossed off her robe and taken the empty stage. She was facing the far side of the room, as though deliberately avoiding the bouncer’s gaze. I had intended to look him straight in the eye on my way out, but there was something about him, about his dark shades, that made me change my mind. Lowering my eyes as I walked out into the blinding sunshine, I felt as though I’d been challenged, and
lost.

  VII

  I'd first heard of Harbor House when I was working as a lifeguard on Fort Lauderdale Beach over two years ago. The lifeguards took to the towers at nine o’clock every morning, and we often found people sleeping inside our posts. Usually they were winos, homeless men, most of whom we knew because they were regulars along the beach. We’d roust them, chew them out, explain that they weren’t supposed to sleep on county property. The thing that bothered me the most was when they peed in the towers. I mean, there you have a whole wide beach, nobody can see you from the street at night if you go down by the water’s edge, but no, they’d pee in a corner of the tower, and I’d have to sit there all day as the hot sun cooked up an intense, pissy smell.

  A couple of years ago, on a morning two days before Christmas, a cold front passed through overnight, and the temperature dropped down into the low forties. I wore sneakers with two pairs of socks, a heavy sweat suit, and gloves. I’d brought my little pocket set of watercolors to pass the time. The shades of green and gray found in a windswept sea were always the hardest to capture on paper. I figured no one would be going into the water that day unless one of the hotels had booked a bunch of Scandinavian tourists. I was assigned tower twelve, which put me way down at the far north end of the beach. I rode a three-wheeled ATV down the sand, the cold wind making my nose run. When I pulled up to the tower, a pile of newspapers and cardboard made it obvious that the structure had a tenant already. At the top of the ladder I looked down into the sleepy green eyes of a fifteen-year-old girl. Her trembling was caused both by the cold and her fear that I was going to turn her over to the cops.

  Her name was Elysia, and she was from Frostproof, a small town in central Florida. She stayed with me my whole shift. Nobody tried to go swimming that December day, so we had eight hours to watch the sea and talk. I wrapped her up in the gray county-issued blanket usually reserved for victims of near-drowning.

  She told me why she couldn’t go back home. She said she and her mom just couldn’t get along ever since her mom had married this bum. Even before she told me, I knew what was coming. I could see the horror and disgust building in her eyes as she worked up the courage to talk about it out loud. When she finally told it, her voice remained emotionless. Her face went slack. It was as though it had happened to someone else, not her. Her stepfather had been sexually molesting her for six months, and according to Elysia, her mom deliberately chose to remain blind to the situation, to keep her man at the expense of her child. Elysia felt she had no recourse but to run away.

  In a few weeks on the streets in Lauderdale she’d gone from being a teenager who smoked a little weed now and again to an addict who was turning twenty-dollar tricks for crack. At five in the afternoon I drove her to Lester’s Diner and watched her, a tiny thing at about five feet two inches and a hundred pounds, put away a mountain of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, salad, and pecan pie. That night was my first visit to Harbor House, but I’d gone back several times in the last few years, to visit Elysia and to drop off a few others I’d picked up along the beach.

  Harbor House had helped her kick the crack and given her a place to stay while she pulled herself back together. Jeannie had assisted with the legal stuff, and Elysia became an emancipated minor. Not needing to go to a foster home, she just stayed on at Harbor House where she worked part-time as a peer counselor and office clerk. Last year, I convinced her to get her GED, and then B.J. helped her get a job as a hostess at the Bahia Cabana, a nice little patio restaurant on the Intracoastal. She was hoping to become a waitress soon, so she could start making the big tips and get out of Harbor House and into her own apartment. Just recently she’d started talking about maybe taking a class at the community college. I drove over the causeway to the beach and found a parking space a couple of blocks from the restaurant.

  She was working the front when I walked in, past the outdoor Jacuzzi, up to the little sign that said Please Wait to Be Seated. She started to turn on the canned spiel for a couple of seconds, then her eyes lit up with recognition, and she ran up and hugged me, standing on her tiptoes.

  “Seychelle! What are you doing here?” She pushed the unruly curls of redwood-colored hair back from her face.

  “I came to see how you’re getting along, kiddo.” She looked great, and I noticed she was still wearing the little golden angel around her neck that I had given her for her birthday the year before.

  Her eyes darted down and she reached for the charm. “My guardian angel’s checking up on me, huh?” Elysia smiled. She pretended not to like it when I watched out for her.

  “Well, somebody’s got to, Ely. Look there. See, that couple just walked in, and here’s the hostess flapping her jaw with some friend of hers.”

  She scooped up a couple of menus from her little podium and strode confidently up to the new arrivals. Her pleated white slacks and high-heeled sandals made even her legs look long, and combined with the required blue-and-white-striped sweater she looked like a shorter version of those models in the classy nautical clothing catalogues. She maneuvered the couple through the inside tables and out on to the deck overlooking the marina. Watching her filled me with a sense of wonder. She had fought her way back from a despair so black I couldn’t imagine it, and she had grown into this stunning, self-assured young woman.

  When she returned, she explained she couldn’t talk and work, so she pointed me in the direction of the bar and told me her shift would be over at five, in about twenty minutes. I sat down to wait, deciding against a beer. After looking at Maddy’s beer gut that morning, I knew I’d been doing too much drinking lately.

  The couples coming in for the early-bird dinner tended to be older people, but many of them entered arm in arm, smiling. The husbands joked and flirted with Ely. They were tanned from days spent sunning themselves like lizards on the beach. I wondered if it had been any of them standing on the beach yesterday morning watching hopefully as the Top Ten nearly went aground. They didn’t have to wonder if someone they once loved was either underwater providing food for the fishes, or a murderer on the run.

  Finally Elysia appeared at my shoulder with her purse tucked under her arm. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  Once we were outside on the street, she pointed toward the beach. “Do you mind if we just walk for a while? That’s what I usually do after my shift, before I catch the bus back to Harbor House. I need the fresh air.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said.

  We dodged cars, jaywalking across A1A in front of the Jungle Queen tour boat dock at the Bahia Mar Marina, and zigzagging through the parked cars in the city parking lot. When we hit the sand I slipped out of my boat shoes, and Elysia pulled off her white spike-heeled sandals with little red anchors embroidered on them. Now about three inches shorter, she looked younger but more familiar to me. The tall buildings along the Intracoastal cast long shadows across the beach as the sun dropped behind the city. The sand between my toes felt warmer than the evening air. We walked down to the waterline, where small waves broke into golden foam in the last of the day’s sunlight.

  “So, how you been doing?”

  “Not bad. The money’s adding up. I think I’ll have enough for first and last months’ rent on a furnished studio soon.”

  “All right. You’ve come far, you know. I’m proud of you.”

  She didn’t say anything at first. Then finally she said, “Seychelle, I know you didn’t come down here just to tell me that. I mean, you tell me how proud you are every time you see me these days.”

  I smiled at her. In some ways she was wise way beyond her teenage years. “Something happened yesterday, and I wanted to talk to you about it.”

  “I heard about Neal. Some guys at the bar were talking about what happened on this big yacht, and when they said the name of the boat, I knew it had to be Neal.” She ran her fingers through her hair and bit her lower lip. “I didn’t really know how to bring it up when you walked into the restaurant like that. I’m sorry.”


  My throat constricted, and I couldn’t say anything for several seconds. A fancy sportfisherman raced toward the inlet, throwing up a huge, creamy bow wave, the hired skipper hunched over the wheel high up on the flybridge while his paying customers drank their liquor in the air-conditioned cabin below.

  “You know, Ely, I thought I had been through it all with Neal. I thought I had finally got him out of my system for good. And then this happens, and suddenly he’s thrust back into my life. I can’t believe he’s dead, Ely. In fact, I don’t believe it. And I’ve got my reasons.” I shook my head and stared out to sea. “Life’s so strange sometimes.”

  “Yeah, I know. I mean, look at me.” She did a little pirouette in the sand. “Who’d have thought, after all the shit I’ve been through, that I’d end up like some little debutante in a sailor suit?” We both laughed loud and hard. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t all that funny.

  “Did you know the girl, Ely? The one who was with him. I found out she used to stay out at Harbor House.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Patty Krix.” As soon as I said the name, I saw the recognition in her eyes.

  “Patty was with Neal?”

  “Yeah. I guess they’d been seeing each other for a while. When I found out she’d lived at Harbor House, I thought maybe you could tell me something about her. Did you know her?”

  We walked past a surf fisherman wearing hip waders, casting his line into the waves. He had white hair and a fluffy white mustache. He looked a little like Einstein.

  She took a while to answer, as though she was choosing her words carefully. It seemed so out of character for this impetuous girl. I watched her face closely to see if she was telling the truth. One of the first skills learned in a life on the streets was the ability to lie without any trace whatsoever of moral conflict. Elysia was an artist.

  “Yeah, I knew Patty. Not real well, but I knew of her. I saw her around.”